Soyonbo Borjgin is from Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, China, where he worked as a journalist at the state-owned, Mongolian-language Inner Mongolia Life Weekly in the last few years of its existence. He later moved to New York, where has peed in a bottle while delivering packages for Amazon and worked for VOA’s Mongolian language service before getting DOGEd. It’s a long way from home: His grandfather was an illiterate shepherd who kept 30 dogs and ate wolf hearts; his father became a professor at Inner Mongolia University, then a prisoner for protesting in the 1989 demonstrations.
The Inner Mongolia Life Weekly went defunct after the Chinese government’s reversal of long-standing policies of encouraging ethnic minority language learning, which resulted in the cancellation of classes taught in Tibetan, Uyghur, and Mongolian languages, shuttering of vernacular media, and removal of street signs. Soyonbo had to attend re-education classes, and his career as a journalist in China was over.
He now writes a newsletter on Mongolian issues and recently published a fascinating piece in Equator that describes his experiences being re-educated in Xi Jinping thought after the crackdown on Mongolian identity.
In this conversation, we discuss:
Growing up in a Mongolian-speaking community in Hohhot
Working as a journalist at Inner Mongolia Life Weekly
Storytelling and navigating censorship
Scandal and corruption at state media
Changes in China’s ethnic policies and language rights and the 2020 campaign against Mongolian language and identity
Shaman curses and creative resistance against language suppression
End of the Inner Mongolia Life Weekly
Cultural identity and language among Mongolians abroad
“Re-education” and the ways authoritarianism affects daily life
Exile and cultural adaptation
The Rhyming Chaos podcast is produced by Jeremy Goldkorn and Maria Repnikova, and edited by Cadre Scripts. The theme music is Paper Boy, composed and performed on the guzheng by Wu Fei. Our closing music is Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1, arranged and performed by Wu Fei. Our cover art is by Li Yunfei.
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